Natural Science Forum / Biology / Botany / February 2005

American Biology Teacher (ABT) and Journal of Biological Education from
England are probably the two main journals with undergrad plant
physiology labs over the years, although ABT has had fewer plant
articles the last couple years.

I posted a list of journals with plant articles in this group way back
in Dec. 1995. It included all levels. Supposedly, Plant Physiology was
to publish teaching articles but I don't think it has had many.
http://www.bio.net/hypermail/plant-ed/plant-ed.199512/0000.html

Biology Lab Clearinghouse has a bunch of plant physiology labs and is
meant to be a repository for all biology labs.
http://blc.biolab.udel.edu/plants.html

The National Association of Biology Teachers got a $750,000 NSF grant
to start Biology Education Online. It was to be a refereed biology
teaching journal for K-16 but it seems to be defunct with the last
article published in Nov. 2003. With just three articles published,
that's $250 grand per article.
http://www.accessexcellence.org/LC/BEOn/

You can locate a lot of the plant education articles via the ERIC
database. It goes back to about 1966.
http://www.eric.ed.gov/

I collected about fifty plant physiology lab manuals from the late
1800s onward. Someday I will have to post a list of them. Among the
earliest was Francis Darwin and E. Hamilton Acton's "Practical
Physiology of Plants. (1894). London: Cambridge University Press.

The American Society of Plant Physiology lists several plant physiology
manuals on its webpage "Teaching a Plant Physiology Laboratory Course
for the First Time?" by Carol Reiss:
http://www.aspb.org/education/teach_1st_time.cfm

Emanuel Epstein of the University of California, Davis had a Plant
Nutrition Lab manual with four short labs plus an extended nutrient
deficiency study using solution culture.
The labs were Estimation of Zinc in Water, Measurement of Tissue Free
Space, Ion Absorption by Excised Roots and Ion Transport into the
Xylem.

Fast plants and C-fern have some interesting labs.
http://www.fastplants.org/home_flash.html
http://cfern.bio.utk.edu/

David R. Hershey

I forgot to mention a list of 1998-99 plant teaching articles I
compiled for this group:
http://www.bio.net/hypermail/plant-ed/plant-ed.199904/0060.html

On the question of service learning for a plant physiology or plant
science lab course. William F. Ganong in the early 1900s described a
novel approach that might be a way to use service learning in a plant
physiology lab class,

"In Plant Physiology this will take the form of a critical study of all
the plants available to teachers with a view to determining for each
physiological process, first, what plants are best adapted in practice,
either because of the large quantities they yield, or for other
equivalent practical reason, for the demonstration of that process:
second, how much, quantitatively, may be expected therefrom; third,
what quantities are yielded by the other, less useful, available
plants; and fourth, what special precautions should be observed in
order to make sure of the best results. Into the large and attractive
field here open, I have directed some of the activity of my own
students, with a result that several contributions of this kind of
educational-physiological organization, intended to be of direct use to
the teacher, have already been published by them in the Botanical
Gazette, while others are to be expected in the future."

Ganong (The Teaching Botanist, 1910, Macmillan)

Ganong's students published six teaching articles in the Botanical
Gazette from 1905-1908 on best plants and methods for teaching
experiments on chlorophyll solutions and spectra, root pressures and
exudations, numbers and sizes of stomata, demonstration of starch
formation in leaves, transpiration quantities and protoplasmic
streaming. There are plenty of possibilities for that today given the
several print and internet outlets for plant teaching materials.

Another idea would be for students to develop an exciting educational
plant display for the general public at the campus greenhouse, public
school, homecoming, arboretum, botanic garden, museum, county or state
fair, flower show, etc. It could feature some of the following:

- hydroponics and aeroponics
- making leaf starch prints
- plant nutrient deficiency symptoms
- rootzone pH changes in hydroponics visualized with pH indicators
- apical dominance demo
- chlorophyll fluorescence demonstration ("plant neon")
- albino corn plants grown by feeding them a sucrose solution through
cut leaf tips
- visualizing photosynthesis via oxygen production by leaf disks or
aquatic plants
- carbon dixode deficient plants
- gravitropism demo with plants growing straight horizontally using a
clinostat but curving upward without a clinostat
- phototropism demo with and without a clinostat
- hormone effects such as ethylene effects on cut flower senescense,
auxin promoting rooting of cuttings, gibberellins promoting stem
elongation, etc.
- force produced by seed imbibition, such as bursting jars
- collection of fascinating plants such as carnivorous plants,
parasitic plants, Mimosa pudica, smelly flowered plants, viviparous
plants (Tolmiea menziesii, Kalanchoe daigremontiana), four leaf clover,
etc.
- skeletonized leaves
- Collection of economic plants including those grown from supermarket
plants, such as pineapple, peanut, coffee, citrus, ginger, potato,
sweet potato, date palm, papaya, avocado, mango, star fruit,
pomegranate, etc.
- For children, giveaways of Mimosa pudica seedlings, plantlets of
Kalanchoe daigremontiana, etc.

David R. Hershey